Overall numbers down again. Not commuting by train cut the numbers last time:
this year I think Operation Become Less Fat and so on has cut my reading time even more.
Even the 11 minutes of 5BX exercises per day amounts to 77 minutes per week,
and for the 43 weeks so far that comes to 55 hours. Plus there's the dumb-bells.
Is it all really worth losing ten books per year over?

Highlights
Non-fiction. The highlight has to be the astonishing "Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent,
who successfully disguised herself as a man to see how the other half live.
Also worth a mention are the first two volumes of Simon Schama's "A History of Britain":
both lucid and entertaining (unlike the third).

SF: A disappointing year for SF. Chief disappointment was the long-awaited "A Feast for Crows",
which turned out to be a choppy half-selection of the bits he'd managed to finish.
"A Darkling Plain" successfully brought the Traction Cities kidult series to a suitable climax.
Steph Swainston and Charles Stross managed decent stabs at breathing new life into the old genres
of trad fantasy and hard SF.

Other fiction. "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro was a near-perfect novel: poignant and
disturbing. "The Vengeance of Rome" by Michael Moorcock brought the Colonel Pyat series to
another good close. "The Athenian Murders" was an elegantly high-concept mystery.

Comics: Didn't read very many this year. Pick of the bunch was the classic bit of revisionism
"Kingdom Come".

I've managed to read basically nothing this year. I am about 15% through Thomas Mann's Zauberberg and have read the first few pages of A Feast for Crows. I read the Famous Five a quarter of a century ago (where does the time go?). I ought to read more, but I don't have the time.

I kept a list last year, and started doing the same this year. Unfortunately sometime in May my Psion decided to eat the file and I didn't restart. I hope to return to it next year, possibly with a nice shiney web application to record it all.

I have to pay for the books somehow. As I've mentioned in the past, I read fast (30 seconds a page of a typical paperback) and I don't need to think about pronunciation when I'm reading which is what limits most peoples reading speed.

But amazon changed their link format recently, which broke the functionality. I think these are showing up because they're old links in the old format.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

Wondered if it was me. What was it, the trackbacks? Will it break it again if I do "Edit story"?--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

(a) The first time I happened to think of posting a roundup was in October.
(b) It sucked. Click on the title for details.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

Also, all his books are set in some kind of intertextual/expressionist slightly parallel universe. So if "Never Let Me Go" is SF then you have to make all his other books SF too, including "Remains of the Day".--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

"To this day that was the most bullshit caesar salad I have every experienced..." - triggerfinger

You are the Lord God BuFoo of by johnny (4.00 / 1) #21Wed Oct 04, 2006 at 07:49:45 PM EST

readers here on HuSi. Although I don't always agree with your analyses, they are generally intelligent and I enjoy them, so good show old chap what what. And also you read six jillion more books per anum than do I or any other HuSite, so you win on points already.

As a reader of your reviews, I would be happier to see less SF and more LiFi. (I do note your doing Updike, which I commend, even though I'm not much of an Updike fan myself.) For example, I think you should just bite the goddamn bullet and read Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time." Yes, I know it's not your cup of tea and blah blah blah. But it's a serious statement about serious stuff and it has a serious style, so the style itself is a statement. To art of this seriousness, as Mrs. Lohman said, "attention must be paid." At your rate of reading you could probably finish the 3000 pages over a weekend.

Or if a 12 novel cycle in a style that does not appeal to you is too much to ask, might I at least ask that you read "Call it Sleep", by Roth? Or Naked Lunch (an entirely different affair) by Burroughs? Both of these books are, in my opinion, masterpieces in some sense of the word, and yet they are both written by writers who are, at best, morally suspect, and at worst, possibly, reprehensible or even, dare I say it, "evil" in some sense of the word.

Just to be clear: I am deeply ambivalent about the moreal significance (sp?) of both of these books; I contradict myself from one moment to the next. And yet I find them in many ways beautiful, even sublime. So I don't want to debate them; I want a deeper understanding of them.

I can suggest a few dozen other books about which I would be curious to get your reaction. Speak up if interested.

She has effectively checked out. She's an un-person of her own making. So it falls to me.--ad hoc (in the hole)

Since I liked "The Plot Against America" a lot. Already read The Naked Lunch.

Can't really see the point of "A Dance to the Music of Time": it doesn't seem to be generally regarded as a very important work; and it looks pretty long, dull and on topics that don't interest me. If I cared about the literary canon, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Proust would probably come before that anyway.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

Call it Sleep was written by Henry Roth in the 1920's or so. Perhaps the 30's. It's about a poor Jewish immigrant family living in tenaments in New York City, moving from place to place when they couldn't make the rent, etc. It's mostly told from the point of view of a boy who ages from about 5 to 12 over the course of the book.

Roth is a beautiful writer who does, it seems to me, magical things in describing the character of the mother in this book, who, when she is speaking or thinking in Yiddish, is an intelligent, subtle, and extremely complex person, but when she is forced to speak in English becomes not only helpless, but nearly simpleminded.

The novel also has strong overtones of incest, and in actual fact, the author had an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, about which he later wrote. Fifty years later. He died about a decade ago, I think.

I didn't know about his personal history when I read the book. But, having read the book, I read more about the author, and found out that he is somehwaqt of a radioactive subject, not unlike William Burroughs, who was a cool hipster, blah, blah, but who also "accidentally" put a bullet through his wife's head and never seemed to consider that to be anything other than an amusing part of his personal legend.

Was Henry Roth a child who did (?innocent?) incestuous things with another child, or was he a (young) adult who raped his child sister?

And in either event, does that matter when considering Call it Sleep as a work of literature?

My answer is, I don't know. But it certainly was a very profound and beautiful book in many ways.

She has effectively checked out. She's an un-person of her own making. So it falls to me.--ad hoc (in the hole)

Every time you post one of these... by toxicfur (4.00 / 1) #25Thu Oct 05, 2006 at 04:20:52 AM EST

I'm inspired to keep my own list, and I bookmark your diary to find new stuff to read. Then I get distracted by something shiny and don't quite manage to get it done. This year will be different. Thanks for posting these.--
The amount of suck that you can put up with can be mind-boggling, but it only really hits you when it then ceases to suck. -- Kellnerin

I don't usually count re-reads unless it's been a very long time. And I don't tend to re-read entire books now, just chunks of them.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

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